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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Life on the Periphery of American Society
Set in the United States at the end of the 20th century, Bones and All closely examines the periphery of American society, where loners and outcasts struggle to eke out a basic existence against difficult financial constraints. Because of her condition, Maren spends most of her life in a state of isolation, moving from house to house and city to city, in order to conceal her cannibalism from the authorities. Each time she moves, her education is interrupted, and her mother must find a new job, preventing her from advancing in her career. Lacking a wider support network, Janelle and Maren scrape by without forming deep roots in any one location, living like fugitives and lying to Child Protective Services. Things become even more difficult for Maren when she is abandoned by her mother, as she only has a small amount of money with which to survive and is too young to gain employment. On her own, Maren is forced to rely on the charity of others, such as Mrs. Harmon, Andy, and Lee. When she runs out of money for the bus, she attempts to hitchhike up north to Minnesota, but is yet again abandoned, left behind in a rural Walmart where she must shoplift to survive. Most of the novel takes place in the unseen shadows of American society – in parking lots, unsupervised businesses, empty houses, model-homes, derelict farms, and other spaces where a person can live, if only briefly, without any money.
Literature as Escapism
Though Maren’s education is repeatedly disrupted by cannibalistic incidents that force her and her mother to move in order to escape detection, Maren is a “voracious” reader with a particular interest in the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and mythology. Each time they move from city to city, Maren packs a rucksack with her favorite books, which give her a sense of stability and continuity in her constantly changing world. For Maren, literature provides her with an escape from her unhappy life. While reading, she is able to inhabit someone else’s perspective and forget about her own troubles. While traveling on her own, she carries a set of her favorite books with her across the country. Though Lee argues that literature is pointless, offering no practical solutions to the unique problems that eaters face, Maren thinks of the characters in her favorite books as her friends, suggesting that she uses these fictional characters as substitutes for the friends she lacks.
Monsters
When Maren is young, her mother reads stories to her, though she is careful to avoid stories from folklore and mythology, as they often contain uncomfortable references to cannibalism. Maren, however, is drawn to these stories, which give her a way to understand her own condition. From an early age, she notices that, in these stories, only monsters such as giants and ghouls eat human beings, and she infers from this that she is something of a monster herself. Though these stories about monsters suggest to her that she will never be able to live a normal human life, she is nevertheless fascinated by them. When the man-eating monsters are defeated or punished in the books that she reads, such as Roald Dahl’s The BFG, she feels disappointed, as she identifies with the monsters rather than the children in these stories. Throughout Bones and All, characters refer to monstrous figures from fairy tales, fiction, and mythology when discussing “eaters.” Travis, for example, tells Maren that he was amazed when he first heard about eaters, excitedly imagining normal-looking men and women who can crunch up the bones of their victims like the giants and ogres of fairy tales. Ultimately, Maren comes to accept her status as a monster, embracing her cannibalism without guilt or shame.
